upgrading BIOS

  • Thread starter Thread starter King of Red Lions
  • Start date Start date
K

King of Red Lions

Hi, I have an old motherboard, ms6159 which is not compatible with my
harddrive. I heard from someone that I could upgrade the bios without
even removing the case from my computer. Could someone please tell me
how this is done? Many thanks!
 
Go to the web site for the computer manufacturer or motherboard manufacturer
and get the BIOS flash for the motherboard. You MUST get the correct flash
for the motherboard. If you get the one for the wrong motherboard, you could
destroy your motherboard.

The flash usually will make a boot floppy that you boot to and it installs
the update. Some of the newer ones have an option to download a Windows
version of the flash. This will run a small utility within windows to, I
believe, place a pointer to the flash in the boot sector of the hard drive
so that when you reboot the flash is done automatically.
 
PS.

For what add-in IDE controller cards cost these days, if the BIOS flash
won't do what you want, you may just want to get an add-in controller card.
The add-in card may even have better performance, therefore taking full
advantage of you new drive, than what is built into the motherboard.
 
Joe said:
http://www.msicomputer.com/support/bios_result.asp

You can find your bios there but I doubt it will fix your issue. In what way
is your Hard drive not compatible?

Joe
Click to expand...

Well the computer just seems to stop responding when I put my new HD in.
It stops responding when it is in the prcoss of trying to find each
drive on computer start up. I was told that this means the bios needs
updating. Is this so?
 
Well the computer just seems to stop responding when I put my new HD in.
It stops responding when it is in the prcoss of trying to find each
drive on computer start up. I was told that this means the bios needs
updating. Is this so?
Click to expand...

Not necessarily. It could well be a misconfigured jumper on the hard
drive, or a connector that isn't connected properly, or a power issue.
Or it could be that the IDE controller doesn't support a newer hard drive.

I've never had this problem myself, but the impression that I've got is
that the major problem is with drive capacities that are higher than
some limit. 137 GB is, I think, the most common limit these days. Again,
the impression that I have is that this exhibits as a failure to see the
full size of the drive rather than a boot problem.

If you've checked all of the other possibilities and it is an
incompatibility between your motherboard and your hard drive then, as
already posted, an add-in controller card would probably fix it. Drive
overlay software, available from the hard drive manufacturer's website,
is also an option. Both of these would avoid the potentially risky
procedure of flashing the BIOS on the motherboard.

If everything goes right then it's actually very painless to flash the
BIOS, but the consequences of a failed flash are severe, and the
possible causes of problems fairly common - the new file will be a file
downloaded from the Internet, with all that that entails, the new file
is incredibly specific - sometimes even down to the revision number of
the motherboard as well as the particular model, and any interruption to
the process - power failure, flakey floppy disc, computer crash - is
likely to be catastrophic and result in a fried motherboard. Although
you might be able to find somewhere with an EEPROM reader that can
reflash the BIOS to the factory default even if it does go wrong.

HTH.

CK
 
Back
Top